However mistaken any given listener may find some of these choices, there’s never doubt that the mistakes are those of a unique, extravagantly gifted artist, and that the gifts, not the mistakes, remain paramount. Here are a few jottings from my responses to this sequence of recordings, inevitably passing over someone’s favorites en route :

Two songs that became recital favorites in those years, especially for low voices—Beethoven’s In questa tomba oscura and Flégier’s Le cor: In the Beethoven, an exceedingly slow tempo, so that the note values are drawn out almost to the breaking point. The song’s middle section (“Lascia che l’ombre ignude“) becomes a magisterial reproach;  the contrasts between loud and soft, with their associated textures, are otherworldly. It could be argued that the song becomes distended. I would argue that it’s fulfilled. In the Flégier: the very second phrase, “le soir, au fond des bois,” at mezzo-piano, is the most perfect evocation I’ve ever heard of the song’s heroic storybook longing. French perfect? No, imperfect, like Mary Garden’s or Maggie Teyte’s, the favorite interpreters of French composers Massenet, Debussy, and G. Charpentier. Chaliapin sings that the shade of the great Roland fails to be satisfée, rather than consolée, as in the text. “Consoled” is more to the point, I think.

Another try at “Dormirò sol“: Improved: A more velvety legato at soft dynamics, the open vowels not so nude, the D-naturals at “sotto la volta” much better blended. Not improved: excess protestations at, e.g., “che DI-o sol puo veder” or “il con-SOR-te [splutter] l’o-NOR-e.” This was a much-celebrated characterization, and rightly so, I’m sure, as experienced live. But “Humbug!” to this bit, as recorded. And wouldn’t Feodor have been the all-time great Inquisitor?

And here (Oct. 9, 1922) is the first stab at Song of the Volga Boatmen, a folk song that (at the urging of Gaisberg, who caught the scent of a big seller), Chaliapin and Feodor Koenemann, composer of the inescapable “When the King Went Forth to War,” arranged and orchestrated. In Chaliapin’s voicing it penetrated the popular culture to the extent of American schoolchildren (including me) singing it in elementary-grade music classes decades later. The best version, I think, is a later one, but this is already astonishing, whatever we may think about the “inauthenticity” of the arrangement.

Ekh ty, Van’ka: One would take a solemn oath that the subito pianissimo, bouncing right off full-voiced notes at intervals near and far, have to be crude tape splices or some form of digital post-production fiddling—otherwise, impossible. But that’s F. C. doing that, in real time, no re-takes unless of the whole song, as if he had an on-off segmentation switch on his vocal cords. And it’s not like yodeling, which flips the position and, nearly always, changes the vowel. Many Russian and other Eastern European basses have mastered wonderful kinds of soft-voiced vocalization (Boris Gmyrya’s, I think, the closest to Chaliapin’s high fil di voce), but none with quite this lightness, tensility,and quickness.

Two Russian art songs, Tchaikovsky’s The Pilgrim’s Song and Glinka’s Doubt: About the closest Chaliapin comes with recital material to “straight singing,” the Tchaikovsky in a high key for bass voice, the Glinka tonally blandishing and emotionally full, with lovely violin playing from Marjorie Hayward.